Warner theater

Part of an occasional series on the hottest races of the 2014 midterm election.

FOREST, Va.—Mark Warner is stricken with the flu. A snowstorm has just forced Liberty University to cancel the speech he was about to give to 10,000 Liberty University students. Now, fresh off a trip to the pulmonologist, he’s trying to win over a lethargic group of 25 community leaders at a technology startup on Jerry Falwell Parkway.

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“I’m working this, guys,” Warner pleads. “C’mon! Don’t be so quiet!”

This is not the kickoff to 2014 Virginia’s senior senator was expecting.

Until December, there was every reason to believe the Democratic former governor, with a 63 percent approval rating and a centrist bearing seemingly in sync with his purple state, would coast to reelection. Then along came Ed Gillespie.

Like other GOP hopefuls across the country, the former Republican National Committee chairman decided the botched Obamacare rollout and President Barack Obama’s declining popularity might create a wave big enough to topple a Democratic incumbent in an election year favorable to Republicans.

To win the Senate in November, Republicans need to swipe Democratic-held seats in conservative-leaning states like Louisiana, Arkansas and Alaska. But that’s not enough: They also need to win in purple states that have voted for Democrats in recent elections. Virginia is one of those places, and Gillespie’s surprise candidacy has buoyed the party’s hopes that it can flip the six seats it needs.

Warner is still a clear favorite to return to the Senate for a second term. But he now has a race on his hands — and is acting like it by coming to small towns like this. The aim is to reassert his bipartisan bona fides and pre-empt the impending onslaught of attacks calling him a loyal Obama foot soldier.

“In 2014, nobody gets a free pass,” Warner told local reporters over and over again during a five-day, 1,161-mile late-January swing across the commonwealth.

The contest has brought out Warner’s competitive streak — the 59-year-old incumbent leaves no doubt he’s eager to go after Gillespie when the time comes. The senator already has $7 million in his campaign war chest and is certain to raise more than enough to saturate the Virginia airwaves this fall with anti-Gillespie ads.

“Stay tuned,” Warner said with a smirk.

The negative phase of Warner’s campaign probably won’t come until Gillespie secures the GOP nomination at a June convention in Roanoke. For now, Warner is in no rush to highlight Gillespie’s liabilities — among them a long list of lobbying clients and his tenure in George W. Bush’s White House.

“I’ve met him once or twice,” Warner said when asked whether he has a relationship with his 52-year-old Republican opponent. “We know lots of folks in common.”

Gillespie, for his part, will portray Warner as a rubber stamp for the president, someone who not only voted for Obamacare but has supported the president’s position 97 percent of the time in the Senate, according to statistics compiled by Congressional Quarterly that Republicans love to cite.

“Warner cast the deciding vote for it,” Gillespie said of the health care law in his campaign launch video last month. “If I were a Virginia senator, it would not be law today.”

Warner notes that National Journal ranked him on the conservative end of the spectrum among Democratic senators. He often criticizes his own party for not being serious enough about entitlement reform.

“There’s a lot of places where I’ve worked with the president,” he said when asked if he’ll campaign with Obama. “There’s a lot of places where I’ve disagreed with the president.”

Warner recognizes his vote for the Affordable Care Act is his biggest vulnerability and that Republicans are determined to make it the defining issue of the race. So he proactively brings up Obamacare before audiences or the media can ask. He blasts the website launch as a “fiasco” and says he always knew “fixes” would be required.

Then he personalizes his pitch. Talking up popular elements of the law, Warner tells audiences that people like his daughter, who has Type 1 diabetes, can no longer be denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

But a more fundamental problem, as Warner tells it, is Republicans did not work in good faith on reforming the health care system.

“There’s a challenge when you do big legislation with only one party because Congress never gets it fully right,” he told students in Charlottesville. “It’s going to be easier to fix when both people own it.”

Running for reelection in a Republican year, Warner boasts that he has Republican partners on every bill he works on. That means a lot of name-dropping. Chatting with a local reporter for one small-town newspaper, he mentioned six GOP colleagues in the space of 10 minutes. He has hosted dinners with Sen. Lamar Alexander and co-sponsored bills with Sens. Bob Corker, Roy Blunt and Johnny Isakson, and with Rep. Frank Wolf. He praised Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Mike Crapo as “profiles in courage” for being open to raising taxes as part of a grand bargain, and Sen. Susan Collins for joining him in “the common-sense caucus.”